This morning I woke up on Mount Desert Island, one year older with no functioning automobile, and absolutely nowhere I need to be.
And, guess what? That is not what I had planned, but as it turns out, the Universe is a far more competent event planner than I will ever be.
As of Saturday afternoon, there was to be a birthday dinner on Monday, sometime after 5 PM but definitely not as late as eight. I researched this. There were options. There is now an entire restaurant guide sitting ready and waiting for the next time I attempt to leave the house in the evening on purpose.
Instead, we may or may not be stranded in Vacationland.
This all began Saturday when Turlach and The Girl dropped me at the laundromat in Southwest Harbor while they raced to the dump before it closed — no Sunday hours — and filled our five-gallon jug with water for cleaning up the cabin in the morning.
DownEast Laundromat, Southwest Harbor.
Somewhere inside the spinning drum, there I am. 😵💫🧺🪞
On the ride to the farm store for Beech Hill Farm, a training ground for College of the Atlantic’s agricultural program, three gallons of the water spilled in the trunk and filled the cavity where the spare tire is hidden underneath the cargo floor. Turlach attempted to bail it out with an improvised traffic-cone device, and later the large empty Dunks cup he remembered he keeps as the driver’s-side trash bin.
Did I mention that I loooove a resourceful man? Your Honor, may I please approach the bench and submit Exhibit A: Turlach MacDonagh?
When we got home, my husband was airing out the car and it started to go splunky. That is the technical term. He took a video. The dashboard computer system went bonkers before it settled on kaput.
The windows were all open, so Turlach took the plastic tarp he had bought for laying over the furniture when closing the cabin and fashioned hillbilly car window dormers.
He disconnected the battery as recommended and decided to hope for the best in the morning. I texted friends, “I will let you know if I accidentally moved to Maine.”
And, “If I did, I hope you guys will visit me.”
One of my girlfriends immediately saw the entertainment potential and proposed a reality show: The Mainers. I think a husband-and-wife sitcom treatment would be more up our alley: My Maine Man. A no-budget guerrilla indie web series with Northern Exposure vibes and public-access prestige television ambitions. And given the BrickDonagh household black belt in bickering, we could always pivot to a murder mystery.
Except something else happened.
Turlach relaxed.
He really relaxed. This absurd pile-up of unlikely events somehow elbowed out enough space for surrender. Though I am tempted to submit a missing-persons report for my husband, the new guy is kinda cute. I think I’m gonna keep him. 😜
A little background for those who are new here: this trip began with Turlach frustrated that our late departure meant we were going to miss every possible dinner option. Even on a wild and crazy MDI Saturday night, most restaurants close by 7 PM or 8 PM sharp.
Plot twist with adequate tension foreshadowing the brief drive to Bernard: as he pulled out of the cabin driveway with just enough time to make it to Thurston’s before closing, he dared to say OUT LOUD, for the nosy Universe to casually overhear, that the trip up hadn’t been as bad as he thought it would be… duh-duh-dahhhhh!!!
As if on cue at dinner, after eating corn on the cob and while sucking the meat out of a lobster leg, the crown on his front tooth cracked right off.
This particular tooth has more stories than Aesop. At 17, while partnering a ballerina through one of those big spins whose technical name I absolutely do not know, her elbow did not get in fast enough. Root canal. Crown. Years later, while in Madrid visiting his sister, he fell face-first and cracked the same tooth. And now, present-day Maine: lobster fight.
After the shock wore off, he started taking lots of toothless selfies with a thumbs-up in the frame. He got in touch with the dentist’s office to evaluate the damage and formulate a plan. Thankfully, that plan did not include having to return home, waving to my parents across the median of Route 1 as they traveled north to visit us midweek.
He was scheduled to get a temporary crown today. Which just so happens to be when we will still be in Maine figuring out where to send the dead car and waiting for Pop Pop to make the six-hour drive back up north to retrieve us.
This week was WFC — Work from Cabin — so Turlach was moonlighting his vacation. He woke early to get online, work a full day and still sign off early enough to shuttle us around, and play both the part of the hair stylist and salon client on our daughter’s unrelaxing version of what I can only describe as Torture Spa.
The Girl kept busy WFC (Working from Cabin) on “special projects”. 😻🐾🏠✨
Wait, let me walk that back. He did take all of Wednesday off.
As did Pop Pop—the artist formerly known as Daddy—so that they could spend a leisurely afternoon bonding and replacing the rotted-out front steps with a stable structure. Which is where the family history starts seeping in…
“My dad’s Pa built Seaside Cabin!” The Girl has become a definitive narrator for her family stories. Her current favorite personal piece of information to share liberally with anyone who will listen is, “My dad is Turlach. He is a weirdo.”
Separately, in car ride conversations with just us girls, she has connected the dots that “You like weirdos.” Yes. Mommy does. You are correct, boo.
This particular weirdo does, however, have one reliably un-relaxed setting: departure.
The final hours before we leave anywhere involve me being terminally behind on packing, which somehow rips a hole in the space-time continuum and sends his stress level into another dimension.
But did you follow this tangent all the way to the beautiful part?
Through no machination of my own, the car cannot leave.
Therefore I cannot possibly be late leaving.
Do you understand what has happened here?
I have been granted immunity.
There is no departure time to miss. There is no increasingly agitated romantic lead querying whether I am almost ready. There is no need for me to explain that yes, technically I am still putting things into bags, but spiritually I have been packing for hours.
The Mazda has done what no organizational system has ever managed to accomplish for me:
It has removed the deadline.
So I am sitting here on the spectacularly uncomfortable red wicker couch that family lore says may have come from an actual fire sale — or salvage — after the island burned long ago. Turlach’s Pa was part of the citizen fire brigades.
The lack of creature comforts gets a pass. It is close to physiologically impossible to be pissed off or stressed out when this is the view.
The Girl came over while her dad was working and asked for his phone. He handed it over so he could get back to work. Later, he found this perfectly composed bit of “Wow” taken from the bay window.🪟🍎⬇️🌳
I’d been nursing an upset stomach all day, which did not make it onto my original vacation Pinterest vision board.
And yet, here I sit: completely relaxed. I can browse the internet and play Shopping Cart on ThredUp to my heart’s content.
My husband is relaxed.
My daughter is less enchanted by our accidental extension. Stick a fork in her: The Girl is D-O-N-E, done.
She has been a trooper about not living inside her homesickness this trip. She has gone swimming and made up games and started the first pass of the screenplay for her debut film as writer-director-producer-star, Beach of Doom, and watched Paw Patrol and “driven” the last stretch of dirt road across Teti land to Seaside Cabin from Turlach’s lap, assuring us:
“Reeeelaxxx. I know what I am doing here.”
The Girl and Gussy Goo, keeping watch over Bass Harbor. 🐈⬛🧒🏼👀
But when she realized the broken car might mean we were not going home when we were supposed to, she lost it and was inconsolable for a stretch.
She wants her house. She wants all of her toys. She wants the approximately seven playgrounds within reasonable walking distance of our front door and more noodle joints than you can shake a stick at — possibly more noodle joints than exist in the entire state of Maine.
And playdates. She definitely wants the playdates. She is past ready.
She has also been problem solving. Her first proposal was that we buy a new car so we can drive home. When they fix our “old” car, they can send it to us. Also, Pop Pop could drive up here and tow us with his van.
And if they do tow the red car, she wants to go with it “because she wants to see how they fix it.”
That is less Whee, field trip! than If this thing is standing between me and my toys, I would like to personally supervise the repair.
Unfortunately, Turlach tried the car Sunday morning and it did not magically start.
So the current birthday plan is that he will call the Mazda dealerships in Waterville and Bangor this morning and decide which one we will be towed to.
Waterville is 105 miles away. AAA gives us 100. Of course it does.
So Turlach upgraded our membership. Five miles. We have apparently reached the stage of vacation where we are upgrading roadside assistance in order to get home.
There is also the small matter of physically getting the Mazda out of here. The parking brake is locked because the car has no power, so we will probably need a flatbed. The car is sitting at the end of an approximately 800-foot-long, narrow, winding dirt driveway.
At first, this raised the obvious question of how on earth a flatbed tow truck was going to get down here. Then Turlach pointed out that if the electric bucket truck can get down here, the tow truck probably can too.
This is not theoretical. The road had to be widened so the electric bucket truck could get down to the cabin before we were able to return post-COVID in 2024. So the infrastructure work that helped make Seaside Cabin habitable again may now be what saves our red car.
There is still, however, the electrical wire that crosses over the driveway. Challenge for AAA personnel: retrieve automobile without also disconnecting cabin power.
Meanwhile, The Girl goes back and forth between watching Paw Patrol and turning the bathroom into a construction site. The stand-up shower stall is a wrecking ball. Her father said the bathroom was a boat. Clearly he does not know what he is talking about.
Duh. The Girl knows what she is doing.
My birthday Boston-adjacent family-friendly restaurant guide is sitting there waiting patiently for the next time I decide to attempt nightlife. With school starting on Thursday, it may be a bit before that summits the priority list. My butt is planted on the best uncomfortable wicker couch in the whole-wide-world, writing, online shopping, and enjoying the fact that for once there is an ironclad external reason that I am not ready to leave.
And here is the best part: our bags are mostly packed.
I spent Saturday afternoon folding and putting away laundry and decided to just pack then and give us one less thing to argue about in the morning. At the very least, I thought, there won’t be a Cadillac-sized mountain of unpacked evidence sitting there in plain sight.
One of many, many iterations of The Original Plan™️ was that if we got ourselves out early enough, we could squeeze in one last trip to Echo Lake — or leave early and visit Laura in Waldoboro on the drive home.
For once, I was ahead of the departure. Vacation-calibrated nervous systems, it turns out, are much better at pulling that off.
The Girl: desperately ready to go home. The husband: M.I.A. and replaced by a suspiciously relaxed Maine main man. The red Mazda: waiting for a flatbed at the bottom of a dirt road with an electrical wire hanging between it and the road.
And somehow, despite the false starts and wrong turns and work-from-cabin and homesickness and crown-versus-lobster and the upset stomach, this has been a really good vacation for me. Relaxing, even. I am not mad that the Universe extended this series for another day.
There is one non-snarky thing I should probably say about my marriage before I ruin the moment by making another joke: Had I picked anyone else to build a ridiculous life with, this could have been one long bad Yelp review instead of a cheeky account of catastrophe after calamity.
10 out of 10 — would marry again.
Worst-case scenario: I have accidentally moved to Maine. We’ll know soon enough, but I hate to sign off with the heroine’s fate still hanging in the balance, so let’s pretend it’s official with a jaunty tombstone draft:
Here lies Kara.
She finally packed on time.
Nobody was mad at her. Yet.
There was absolutely nowhere to go.
I guess she lives here now.
🧳⏰🦞🌊🌅⛵️⚓️⚰️🪦
P.S. — SPOILER ALERT: The Mazda is off to Bangor.
And away she goes.
